Thursday, 7 May 2009

And I Can Barely Talk English Too...

For all the obvious reasons, I find that I tend to use the Cantonese and Hakka parts of my brain more in my Mandarin Chinese classes. It's a lot easier to understand the concepts and grammar quirks when thinking from the perspective of their related dialects. However it does tend to drive my teacher up the wall when I try to reply quicker to improve my fluency - as my speaking then goes towards Cantonese tones and nobody understands what the hell I'm trying to say.

The exciting thing was when I could actually see those classes paying off when I went to HK last month and discovered that I could actually read a lot more around town than I ever could before. However the weird thing was that when I was reading all those road signs and ad-boards, I was actually reading in Mandarin first and translating to Cantonese second... (¬.¬)

So when I'm learning, I'll think in Cantonese/Hakka first and then figure it out from there, when I'm actually practising Chinese I'll think in Mandarin first and then convert to Cantonese...

Confused yet?!

Also, when talking to my Grandad in Hakka, I find I'm beginning to fill the gaps in my Hakka vocab with Mandarin words over Cantonese (since my Hakka is dying but I still find it more grammatically similar to Mandarin than Cantonese)...

I want my eventual 8 kids to speak Chinese too... but in the future I'm thinking they're gonna end up speaking some horrible amalgamation of Cantonese/Hakka/Mandarin/Chinglish coz their dear old papa's brain melted down and decided to just clump the whole lot into one lobe entitled "Just. Chinese." (>.